Artículo completo del libro: Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects.
PETER: For sixteen years, Cresenciana Rodríguez Nieves, a 43- year -old doctor
in the city of Puebla, at the base of the snowcapped Iztaccíhuatl volcano in the central Mexico, has used a wide
variety of native plants, animals, and insect in her practice of what a she
calls Méxica medicine (above). “This”, she says, “is the medicine practiced here before the Europeans
came”. (She doesn’t like term “traditional medicine,” because
she regards it as a pejorative term used to dismiss remedies based on centuries
of folk experience.) Her expertise as a medicinal doctor has helped her to
appreciate the wisdom of, say, treating goiter with stink bugs (they are rich
in iodine deficiency). She treats anemia with grasshoppers, rheumatism with
beeswax, eye cysts with flies---the range of medical application is enormous, she
says. After an impromptu lecture, Cresenciana graciously serves us a delicious
lunch of carrot soup and fresh corn tortillas (no bugs) and then shows us how
to catch grasshoppers with a big woven basket in her backyard.
FAITH: In Oxaca, we stop chasing edible bugs long enough to explore the works
of skilled weavers in the area---and we find more bugs. Female plant - feeding
cochineal scale insects (Dactylopius
coccus) are dried and crushed by the weavers and used in dye baths to give
their yarns a vibrant red color. The cochineal is also used commercially to
color commonly used items like dental plaque remover and sugarless candy, and
more exotic items like the Italian liqueur Campari.
Lest anyone wonder for
too long why only the female cochineal is used--- wonder no longer. The female
cochineals live in small groups and eat prickly pear cactus. Males are solitary
and eat nothing, because they have no mouth. They only live for about a week,
during which time they grow wings, fly off to mate, and die.
I like to think of
this as the work of nature in her imponderable wisdom.
To make half a kilo of
dye, 75,000 insects are harvested by hand and plunged into boiling water to
remove their protective coating. Then the bodies are ground into a powder. The
result is a color that was so widely treasured in the late fifteenth century
that the Aztecs demanded it as tribute from conquered tribes in cochineal
areas. (In the Middle East, red dye from another scale insect, kermococcus vermilius, was almost as
valuable; it was probably used by the ancient Sumerians.) After the Spanish conquest, cochineal became
a profitable Spanish monopoly. When Spain banned the exportation of live
cochineal, French and Dutch bug bootleggers tried to smuggle them out. They
were unsuccessful until the nineteenth century, when France created a cochineal
industry in the- colonial Algeria. Peru and the Canary Islands also became big
producers.
Cochineal dye was
replaced on the marketplace by synthetics until the recent resurgence of
interest in natural products. Today many Oaxacans (right, the weaver Benito with a mortar of ground cochineal) have
come back to cochineal to give their weaving the prized traditional look. Not
everyone is happy going back to natural products though: Lipsticks made with
dyes from insects are not considered kosher by Orthodox Jews.
Fuente:
Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects.
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